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Instagram's new "10 re-shares" rule
And why you don't want to break it
Gupta Media
May 09, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Today’s Social Media advertising rates are hanging tough:
↗️ YOUTUBE: $4.68 CPM | ↗️ META: $7.67 CPM | ↘️ TIKTOK: $3.44 CPM
In this week’s edition:
🤖 Meta unveils new AI tools
Why your CEO will love LinkedIn’s new ad unit 💡
🎸 Instagram pumps up the volume (on stickers)
But first…
⚡ Instagram lays the smackdown on aggregator accounts
📷 Instagram: In a major algorithm update, Instagram announced this week that it will no longer recommend accounts that rely primarily on aggregated content—while also attempting to level the playing field between larger and smaller creator accounts.
Instagram said it has “been working on a new way to rank recommendations to give all creators an equal chance of breaking through,” while acknowledging that in the past, “accounts with the largest followings often saw the most reach.” Translation: Instagram is becoming more like TikTok, where content is shown to audiences regardless of whether they follow the account that posted it—allowing the opportunity for a greater variety of creators to achieve greater reach.
As part of the same effort, Instagram is also prioritizing “original content” — and cracking down on accounts that simply re-post material by others. How will it do that? Within a few months, Instagram says it will begin to sanction “accounts that repeatedly (10 or more times in the last 30 days) post content from other Instagram users that they didn’t create or enhance in a material way,” by ensuring that those accounts’ content “will not be shown in surfaces where we recommend content.”
While this move is primarily aimed at a wave of popular aggregator accounts that have flooded the platform, it will also impact the way brands and advertisers prioritize user-generated content—because no one will want to break the new 10-times-in-30-days rule. Social media managers: you’ve been warned.
The Inside Scoop 🍦: Now trending in performance media
👍 Meta has rolled out sitelinks for Facebook feed ads, enabling advertisers to add multiple landing pages to their ads. (“The site links will appear as horizontally scrollable display labels under the main hero image or video,” Meta notes.) You don’t need to own the sites listed—for instance, music artists can link off to multiple platforms where their songs are hosted. But note that at launch, there will be no separate site-link level performance insights available.
Coming soon: More AI for advertisers. This week, Meta announced expanded AI tools to help advertisers create image and copy variations, and a streamlined generative-AI workflow, all of which will roll out globally by the end of the year.
🎸 Let the music play: In another boon to Stories engagement, Instagram has extended “Add Yours” stickers with “Add Yours Music” —allowing users to reply to trending global conversations by adding their favorite song.
🎮 Roblox has expanded its immersive video ads to all advertisers. In beta testing since November 2023, this ad type—which can scale across Roblox’s virtual environments, without the need to custom-build 3D content—is now available, alongside image ads and portal ads, in Roblox’s self-serve ads manager. Roblox notes that these “new video ads come with expanded controls and features like genre targeting, brand suitability and an audience estimator.”
Coming soon: Later this year, advertisers will also be able to buy “completed views,” a format currently being beta-tested.
🔗 LinkedIn: Your boss is so stoked. LinkedIn has finally launched Thought Leader ads, which allow companies to boost the post of a company employee — instead of being limited to promoting content directly from the company’s page. Note that the employee in question has to provide approval and be associated with the company’s LinkedIn page.
🕰️ TikTok is rolling out more curated ways to advertise across TikTok Pulse — packaging adjacencies to the platform’s most popular content. The Tiktok Pulse “suite” now includes ways to target premium content including custom lineups, tentpole moments, and premiere IP lineups—including Vogue’s coverage of the Met Gala, specific networks and properties within the NBCUniversal universe, and the Paris Olympics.
Update:💡Previously in Beta, TikTok Countdown Stickers with the option to Set Reminder are now available to all. You can choose whether users are reminded a minute, an hour, or a day before the event.
🐘 The Elephant In the Room: Our weekly office poll!
Even as TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, kicked off a counter-attack against the ban-TikTok bill by filing suit against the U.S. government on First Amendment grounds, the U.S. House of Representatives has taken up another bill with big implications for digital marketers. A bipartisan bill championed by two powerful lawmakers, it’s called the “American Privacy Rights Act.” The IAB has called it “quite terrible” and if passed it “would drastically curtail the advertising technology ecosystem,” according to Ad Age.
While still in working-draft form, APRA is envisioned as the U.S. answer to Europe’s GDPR, the legislation that transformed digital privacy protections and forced the biggest players in online advertising — Google and Meta — to change the way they target and communicate with users. While details of the bill are still being ironed out, APRA “would shake things up in advertising by forcing companies to scale down the amount of data they collect on people while also empowering them to manage, correct, and even export their own data,” “say ‘no’ to targeted ads,” and give users “the option to opt out of algorithms influencing major life decisions for them,” according to Digiday.
Will it happen? No one is suggesting it’s a done deal, but on the heels of the TikTok legislation, there’s a sense that momentum is on the side of regulation. “I’ve covered U.S. privacy inertia for a decade,” writes POLITICO’s Mark Scott. “[W]e’re closer to U.S. comprehensive privacy legislation than at any time in the last 20 years.”
What do you think: How will the TikTok ban play out? Place your bets below, we’ll share the results next week.
What will ultimately happen with the U.S. legislation forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban? |
Last week’s poll results: When do you think Google will ACTUALLY deprecate third-party cookies?
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Q4 2024
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Q1 2025
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Q2 2025
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ H2 2025
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 2026
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Never